tour has kicked off, LA, the first show was a bit of a struggle, the band would have been happy with some warming up in less of a high profile venue, the transition to my new cool guitar is dramatic, im still working on it… but D seemed to have a good time and we were subject to favorable reports… best part was i got to talk with Gina Gershon for quite a while after the show..! she’s a gorgeous creature, and really sweet and down to earth, somehow more beautiful in person… also in attendance at the after ritual was Lemmie, I don’t know if its public record or not but I’ve know him for slightly longer than I have known Debbie, i met him when he was still in Hawk during my second trip to the UK, we had some mutual acquaintances and i have always remembered how friendly and gracious he was in spite of my being a civilian… i met DH within a month of returning to nick, sept 73… Rodney introduced us, he’s finally a little more well known as a result of the ‘Mayor’ movie and i saw him being greeted with “hi mayor” a couple of times… Rose McGowan, another doll, we heard Will Farrell, Mickey Bourke were about but didn’t see them, Roy Thomas Baker, Nancy Sinatra, also Tom Scott was a nice surprise (horns on rapture, the sax solo on the Taxi Driver soundtrack among others)…also there was a very well known actor/comedian who will remain anonymous here cause he was so trashed and stoned it was an achievement of some kind that he was able to stand… probably others that i didn’t see… the House Of Blues on sunset is quite the irony, here we have all these well heeled individuals paying to go to this place that’s done up to look like some trashed out southern shotgun shack, the kind of place that in the reality of its real situation people only attended by default cause they couldn’t afford better so i got a new guitar from Fender, its a strat that’s covered with black leather and is an attempt to reference the one i used in the old days, Bob Wall the guy who does the leather work for Jesse James’s bike company did the cover on the guitar… we went out to Fullerton to pick it up at the Fender plant and got the tour, Paul was worried that we would be ‘demystified’ by seeing the guts of the operation but actually there was something great about the operation, it had a hands on kind of feel even though it was on a grand scale… the weirdness is stuff like the insanely exact copy of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s guitar, we met this guy John who is doing a series of 100 of them, said it took him about a week to do one… it has every nick and scratch and bit of rust copied exactly from a large color photo of the original, its really amazing in a crazy fan obsessive way, but even John the builder said that he thought it was sad that most of these guitars would just wind up hanging on walls rather than be played cause the one we tried was really a great instrument…(now that i ponder it a bit, the SRV guitar copy (as well as the line of ‘aged’ “relic” guitars that they make are a lot like the House of Blues joint, a brand new guitars that looks like beat up old ones with a lot of personality) so tonight is this Divas event and we are here in the heart of American madness in lass Vegas… the duet with Eve is looking pretty great, that’s with the house band, Eve has written a new 16 bar rap that’s very clever, starts off with the rhythm of the basic Debbie rap and then goes off then there’s a duet with Joss Stone of one way with us, (apparently Debbie insisted that the band play,) she is very cute and her approach to melisma is more tasteful than a lot of what i hear… now honestly i have mixed feelings about this whole thing (as does DH i know) on one level its pretty straight and lame and the whole diva thing is sort of like celebrating the idea of throwing fits about your dressing room being the wrong color… on the other hand its nice to just be out there on TV… the people doing the show are very nice and as helpful as they can be, after initial tension we (the band) loosened up and the thing might actually be a fun event… i looked at a couple of ‘divas’ message threads and there’s a lot of mention of the possibility of DH and Cyndi singing together… aint going happen this time, it was never proposed to us at any rate… so yeah lass Vegas is the most forlorn awful fucking place in the universe, maybe im just projecting but everyone seems to be in a kind of half dead trance… walking around the casino downstairs, the old ladies zoned out feeding income (presumably) into the ‘loose slots’, its so sad its crazy, i keep thinking about all the images of the war that are coming back over airwaves, superimposing these explosions and burning vehicles onto the rows of cheerfully jingling machines (the proverbial ATM machine that you put your card into and get a note back that says “thank you for the money”) i keep wondering how this can be going on here at the same time as all the mayhem is happening in the rest of the world… who saw general so and so collapsing during the press briefing in Iraq the other day? im not surprised that i cant find anything about it now though I’ve done a bunch of searches… it was shown in conjunction with stories about the fatigue of the troops over there, that 20 thousand of them who are supposed to be coming back this week have been told they have to stay on for another 3-4 months… he was carried off the podium and the story was that ‘he had the flu’… was he really demonstrating his solidarity for the exhausted soldiers who’ve been there for over a year already? was he just fried in the same way? Bob Woodward’s book saying that 700 million in funds was diverted from Afghanistan to the build up for the Iraq invasion long before the official declaration of war, that bush asked the pentagon to start planning the invasion as early as nov. 2001, long before any of the info about the ‘weapons of mass etc’ was in… not much of a surprise really couldn’t the money that’s generated by the insanity of lass Vegas be put to better use? well got go to the dress rehearsal for tonight… see you all at the shows and such